176. Crypto Investing in 2024: Survive Q3, Thrive In Q4

Keep a hold of your coins. Don't let other people take them. These are the historically worst months. They're both down months like you said, 8% and close to 6% on average since 2013. That's fine. It's just another time to accumulate or if you don't have any cash on the sidelines, sit tight or rebalance your portfolio.

Bitcoin prices tend to go up, which is really positive. The greatest returns you're probably going to get at the moment year to date is if you are heavy in bitcoin and Solana, a little bit of ease, but ultimately bitcoin Solana, Solana memes performing pretty well.

Welcome back to another episode of the Ben and Bergs Podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of collective shift, alongside Ms. Burgs, your favorite MBA and CEO of Collective Shift. Join us as we bring you world class crypto research and strategies to help you dominate this crypto bull market as well as behind the scenes view of us getting a fully remote subscription research business here in Australia. If you like the podcast, we'd love for you to leave us a subscribe. Follow us on your favorite podcasting app as we bring you the latest insights on crypto each and every week. And today we're talking about surviving Q3 in crypto and thriving in Q4. Now, what does that even mean? Well, we're going through a bit of a sell off at the moment. We've been chopping sideways for the last six months. At the day of recording, Wednesday the 28th, we've had a little bit of a pullback today, but ultimately this is kind of what's expected in the months of August and September. So the average return on bitcoin prices in August, September, historically the worst over a 12 month period. So in the month of August, the medium average of monthly return since 2013 is down 8.4% and September is down 5.6%. They're literally the worst and second worst months for bitcoin. So where we're sitting at the moment is sort of this period of again, bit of a lower period between the halving and an election year. But there's so many good fundamental things that are coming up that are great catalysts for crypto that we believe, you know, the price is sort of lagging behind and we'll start to get some good momentum heading into Q4. But I'm sensing a lot of frustration, Bergs, a lot of people out there, you know, getting angry, getting mad that, you know, they haven't made a gazillion dollars overnight. But you know, we're crypto, you know, this is, this is volatile markets. If you look over a long period of time, we're going the right direction. But you know, for a lot of the short term, you know, holders and shorter term thinkers, it can be quite frustrating.

Absolutely. Keep a hold of your coins, don't let other people take them. These are the historically worst months. They're both down months like you said, 8% and close to 6% on average since 2013. That's fine. It's just another time to accumulate. Or if you don't have any cash on the sidelines, sit tight or rebalance your portfolio. Get rid of some of your shitters and rotate them into some better assets. Don't get rid of your good stuff. You know what to do. Don't get bored, don't get fomoed. And this period of time, like even when prices go down, like today, like these are prices not seen since last week, like it's not a massive deal here. We went through all these emotions recently and this is actually a crucial time when not much is happening or it's down and it's idle time. People feel like they need to do something, Ben. They need to be active, they need to research more, they need to, you know, jump onto the next thing, deploy significant capital. And that's just not the case. And even a buddy of ours who's insane has a really great crypto knowledge ended up getting scammed out of a few of his coins. And that just shows where people's heads are at. You know, there's scammers are out there. It's very boring period of time. And they know that people are chasing gains. They want that huge green candle that everyone has been promised. But what you need to do as an investor is sit with the pain, execute against your strategy. Don't FOMO into anything. Ride this short term period out, think long term and you will be absolutely fine.

Yeah, great point. Burgs and I've got my, I've got my hat on today, if you can see that. It is the Lehman Brothers Risk Management Division 2008. And the reason I've got this is because of the, the leverage trading that still goes on and you know, people getting wiped out. So today there was just in the last few hours this morning before we recorded $57 million of Bitcoin longs were liquidated and over 28 million of longs were liquidated from ETH. And when you get these, you know, massive long Positions wiped out, you get a, you know, really sharp sell off. And you know, ultimately this is going to take, you know, a lot of, you know, a lot of price and, and wipe a lot of people out. But you know, fundamentally like Burgs was saying, there's still so many great things that are happening. So we've just had the drone power come out and, and, and mention that, you know, rates will be coming down the first time we've had rate cuts in four years and the market is expecting somewhere between 75 and 100 basis points, which is pretty big by the, by the end of the year.

That's a big cut and it's a huge signal to the market as well.

Huge, huge signal, right. So, you know, as money becomes cheaper and easier access, it finds its way on a risk on assets and ultimately what happens is the US dollar continues to weaken and the US index and I posted a chart yesterday on Twitter basically showcasing that as the US dollar index weakens and as more money is created and we get global liquidity increasing, the US dollar decreases and that ultimately has an inverse correlation with Bitcoin. So as we see a weakening US dollar, Bitcoin prices tend to go up, which is really positive. Now outside of that as well, we've also got continuous spot Bitcoin ETF demands. We actually had one of the biggest days in the last two months yesterday from the Bitcoin etf and we consider they're going to continue to increase over the next few months and as well as a lot of the Mt. Gox distributions are done or nearly done with FTX stuff is done. So there's a lot to look forward to. It's more about just sitting idle. The stock market is continuing to perform really well and I think just the attention is away from crypto at the moment and you know, that's sort of playing out across the board. There's not many new participants in the market right now, but we believe that'll change.

Exactly. And the toughest thing right now is managing your psychology. All the things you mentioned then the hugest green flags for this and catalysts. And we know we're in that lull between now and 18 months post halving. You don't know when it's going to happen, but it will happen. So fundamentally things are great, great things on the horizon. You know there's going to be fireworks and managing your psychology during this period of time. And my psychology is pretty much the same it was in the bear market. Like the prices we're at now might as well be a bear market because the prices I have projected are going to eclipse what is happening now. So I'm still accumulating. It's fine, just keep accumulating, look at the charts, feel nothing, accumulate more. That's the kind of psychology I have and I'm not thinking short term at all. It's definitely long term and I think probably the biggest change for me in the last couple of years was feeling I had to make all this money very quickly and I just don't like I've got enough money for the lifestyle that I live and if I look at the money I have and it doubles every seven to 10 years, that's more than enough. If you take that long term outlook, do a little bit of forecasting, see what you actually need, you don't need to make it all today. That's when things get really risky and you end up losing a lot of your capital.

Yeah, I think it's risk mitigation like you said Berg I'm seeing a lot of people that you know I'm working with on the platinum side. Some of our platinum clients or even just in the public a lot of people are over indexing on altcoins right now and I don't think you really need to do that. Like we've seen bitcoin dominance highest it's been in four years. So altcoins are being squeezed. The greatest returns you're probably going to get at the moment year to date is if you are heavy in bitcoin and Solana little bit of ease but ultimately bitcoin Solana, Solana memes performing pretty well but then also a lot of the coins that you know we've invested in are very much outliers. You know Maker Dow performing really well. Jupiter Maple performing well. You know Ronan's done reasonably well. You know there are outliers amongst the thousands and thousands and thousands of coins. You just need to have the right allocation. I was speaking to someone earlier today, a new Platinum Platinum client in our strategy session and I think the problem that I was, I was trying to get across to him is that no longer like in previous cycles where you just go and buy a bunch of stuff and everything goes up. You know he was listening, he was a part of another group which in my opinion was pretty horrific advice came across to, to me or us had no Bitcoin, had 30 different altcoins and was just was frustrated. Why his portfolio was down, you know, 40, 50% like that. That, that's not the same as previous cycles. You could have just barreled into any old coin in the previous cycles and it would have just gone up. That's not the case this time around. There's, there's far less retail capital. Narratives are happening much faster and much quicker. They come and go, especially in the meme coin space. And you really need to be on top of things because it's not as easy as just picking something that's all going to go up. There's less capital this cycle in terms of more coins, less capital, like more supply, less demand. And you need to be rotating in and out at the right time, especially when dominance is high. If you've got big altcoin position that it's not going to be performing well right now.

And it's a case of just getting the basics right. Like if you're spending the majority of your time in altcoins and researching them and investing in them, make sure you've got the basics down first. It's like with anything if you start a new hobby or Ben you go to the gym, right, you want to get the basics done, you want to have a program, you want to make sure you're consistent and you're doing the things that your body needs even if they suck. This is akin to, you know, btc, Solana Eth, getting that side right, getting a few alts, not too many and making sure that your portfolio is in check. The holistic thing of getting those base assets and checking your portfolio and making sure the construction is where you want it to be for your goals is where you should spend most of your time not trying to find the next million X coin. Because yeah, and you get the most benefit. It's very 8020. Like you know, you get the most benefit from doing the basic stuff and.

That'S the shit that YouTubers are talking about. Like even this guy this morning, like he's fairly new to crypto, to telling me like what isn't, isn't 10 and 50x coins like normal? I'm like, no it's not. That's, that's garbage. And, and, and 99 of the coins are worthless and a lot of them that they promote anyway are small cap coins that they pump to their audience and probably selling it back into you. Like you just exit liquidity. Like those days are over. Like yes, you can find these coins, they're going to do well, but it's not like six month return sort of stuff. You know, you need to find good quality projects that have the narrative, that have the excitement, that have fundamental value. They're the ones that are going to out outperform this cycle. Not just shitty low cap coins.

Yeah. And just think like, are you that person that can do that research that's mining coins early, that's in those communities when they've just formed. What is your edge there and how are you finding them? And the reality of those YouTubers is they've either gotten an allocation, they're paid to do it. You are the exit liquidity. So they sell into you and that's why the coin goes up. Or they bought a hundred of these coins and one or two starts to go up and as a price action happens, that's what they start to report. Like this is not a common thing in crypto. It does happen, but it takes a longer period of time. And again, think about this. If a coin, you know, 50 X's, how many cycles within that coin do you have to hold that you wouldn't have taken profit for 100%.

And what are their incentives like for. For most, I think they just made money through their, their affiliate links and pushing you to different exchanges to make awful trades. Like that's how they made their money, not from actually investing themselves. And I, and I guess that's really where collective shift as a company, we've really tried to make sure it's super, super clear that we're investors from day one. Right. The business model behind what we do is no affiliates, no advertising, no paid promotion, no bullshit. The only way our operation works is the independent research we put out, we get paid for. And as long as we're doing a good job, people stick around. And we've got over a thousand people that pay for our stuff. Like that's, that's the only way this thing works.

Yeah. And our whole business is run on two things, trust and independent thought. So you know, people need to be able to trust our analysis and that we're not shilling them coins that we own. And we do that in several ways, particularly our trust and transparency. But people stick with us because the method works and they get the result that they want. And you know, we tell people like, you know, you need to think long term, you need to get your base done and then you can go into alts. And the second thing is independent thought. So while we provide you research, we scan the market, we look over thousands and thousands of coins, we dive deep into these projects and the ones that would actually need your attention, we think are worthy of your attention, we write articles on them and we present them to you so you can put that and see if that fits in your portfolio and you can conduct additional research on those specific coins. So you are actually not just saying these guys have said this or this YouTuber said this or that person. We promote that independent thought and how it fits in with your investing goals. Like those are the critical things for us.

Yeah, it's data backed, it's research. And again like I, it's so cringe worthy sometimes some of the stuff I see online and, and, and people follow like especially technical analysis, like that is an art, not a science. Right. There's you know in, in, in stock markets and equities and things like that. Forex. Yeah, that's been around for a long time. There's a lot of data. Crypto, yes, it can help you but for a lot of people that are just beginners, you know, TA is not that helpful. I can give you a trend but it's not going to give you, you know what, what's really going on. Again, what was happening in the last two weeks is like all these TA experts were saying or once we cross 62,000 US we've confirmed we're on an uptrend and then you know, it's just hold on from then what happened. We went to 63 and now we're back at 58. Like it's just all of it. Like you, you need to follow data and insights and, and look at a longer term perspective. There's too many variables in crypto for the short term to be trying to navigate short term volatility.

Exactly. And you know, this is why we write bullish and bearish on our projects. We'll say hey, the, the ones we do research on because we'll bring it to your attention and we'll say these are all the green flags for this project but they need to overcome these hurdles in order for it to be really successful. Speaking of TA mate, I love these new videos people are putting out. Whether like oh, it's doing this, it's doing that. You know, it's like they're drawing all these like pictures and everything and it's like bang. And they place like loud, busy. The next second just like drops. It's just, it is so, so good.

It's like I, I love the ones where they go well if, if this happens it's going to do this, but if it does this, it could do that. And then just like the third option that they didn't even, you know, didn't even say happens, it's like this is just what a waste of time.

This is the thing with technical analysis is it's just another tool. It's historically looking, there are future patterns and really that's just to get a small edge when you are trading. That's what that is designed for. It's not to predict the future, it's to get you know, 53 right and 47 wrong and you'll be okay. But in order to do that you need to have significant capital, you need to be a trader, trade a lot. So you're getting that 3% advantage over the rest of the market.

Yeah. And you know, even traders you're probably aiming for yet you might make 50%, 100% on, on a trade but it's going to be like, you know, a small percentage overall of your overall portfolio. Like it's not like you're trading hundreds of thousands of dollars in a half a million dollar portfolio. Like if you've got half a million dollar trading account, you're probably only risking 1 or 2%. Right. So you're trading you know, $5,000, $2,000 and you're making 50 on that. You know like.

Yes.

And, and those trades might come and go and then you also lose just as much. So where we've made our money, where I've made my money is finding good projects holding for six to 18 months, sometimes a little bit longer, finding that the right part of the cycle, getting on a trend before it occurs and selling and dollar cost averaging out near the top. It's a simple strategy. That's your edge, you need to know your edge and that's really where we try and help others find their edge. If they're busy, you can utilize our data to help you get ahead.

Spot on, man.

Well, I think that's, I think that's it for today. We just wanted to again give you a little bit of calm confidence. We know a lot of your listeners, I hear from you that you like our little know insights and there's nothing to really change folks. You know, we have good days, we have bad days, but ultimately long term we're heading in the right direction. Fundamentally things are solid. The election is coming up. We recently did a post for members around the US Election how that's impacting on the crypto. We'll probably do an episode maybe next week on that as we get closer because that will have an impact on the, on, on prices. So we'll sort of walk through how that's going to look. But great episode. Off to Brisbane tomorrow, heading up and down into the SwiftX offices. We've got a little event up there. I think some of the platinum guys are coming and should be good. There was a run club today, though. Definitely not going to that.

I like how, you know, you conveniently like traveling around the with upside down with like, oh my. Greg, brilliant. And then I see this run club in Brisbane and Ben is just conveniently absent because he's not going today.

Busy guys for the running. I'm busy.

Busy doing what, mate?

Someone's gonna run the business. You've taken a couple days off, mate, I've gotta. Someone's someone, yeah. What?

Two days off my ass. Like exact media yesterday. Deal with all that and slack and then dealing with this, mate. What? I haven't even had three minutes off, mate. I might as well be bloody working. I'd have more time off. What a load of. I tell you what, I've been away from the company for 14 seconds and it just all falls apart with Ben trying to run it.

He's allergic to hard work, this guy, folks.

He's allergic to it, mate. I'm allergic to. Mate, Just smell it.

Right, guys. Rub it out there. Thanks so much for listening. If you love the episode, we'd love for you to leave it. Leave us a follow or share this episode with a friend. It's how we grow the podcast and we'll see you on the next episode.

Thanks. Championship.